Dojan

Through the years I've bounced between different engines. I gave Bing a decent go some years back, mostly because I was interested in gauging the performance and wanted to just pit something against Google. After that I've swapped between Qwant and Startpage a bunch. I'm a big fan of Startpage's "Anonymous view" function.

Since then I've landed on Kagi, which I've used for almost a year now. It's the first search engine I've used that you can make work for you. I use the lens feature to focus on specific tasks, and de-prioritise pages that annoy me, sometimes outright omitting results from sites I find useless or unserious. For example when I'm doing web stuff and need to reference the MDN, I don't really care for w3schools polluting my results.

I'm a big fan of using my own agency and making my own decisions, and the recent trend in making LLMs think for us is something I find rather worrying, it allows for a much subtler manipulation than what Google does with its rankings and sponsor inserts.

Perplexity openly talking about wanting to buy Chrome and harvesting basically all the private data is also terrifying, thus I wouldn't touch that service with a stick. That said, I appreciate their candour, somehow being open about being evil is a lot more palatable to me than all these companies pretending to be good.

There are search engines that do this better. There’s a world out there beyond Google.

Kein Fisch. Nur Reis.

Israel has money. Palestine does not.

When the choice is between lives and money, money always wins. Such is the society we’ve managed to build.

I’d be fuming if someone called me away from work for some bullshit reason like blasphemy.

What exactly is the “threadiverse?”

At my old workplace we ended up getting like a thousand toilet seats delivered to us. We were a web publishing firm.

Or Swedish.

Everyone's envious of free dental care.

Ah, thanks. I typed it all out on my phone. It constantly corrects stuff I don't need corrected.

Nah it’s kirakira names in general. So weird made-up readings, pop culture references 光宙 (pikachuu falls under both), foreign words, and taboo/denigrating names.

For example.

• 皇帝 (koutei) meaning emperor, read as Kaiser
• 光宙 (kou, light and chuu, space) read as Pikachuu
• 愛保 (ai, to love, and ~~go~~ ho, to keep) read as Rabuho (love hotel)
• 宝冠 (takara, treasure and kanmuri, crown) read as Tiara.

I think it means masturbating and increasing the revolutions of a motorcycle.

Ooh, pretty! You can call that a chopper? TIL, thank you!